Inspired by the pioneering work of Christian Le Provost on finiteelement ocean modeling a new ocean circulation model was developedover the last few years. It applies a surface triangulation and finiteelements for an accurate description of coasts and bathymetry and theirsteering effect on the ocean circulation. A novel feature is the meshdesign which allows a vertical structure in geopotential (z)coordinates without loss of flexibility and avoids pressure gradienterrors everywhere except for the lowest layer of abyssal ocean. Themodel is combined with sea level measurements and data assimilation,another major research topic of Christian Le Provost. We apply the SEIKfilter which was developed in Grenoble while Christian was teachingthere. The addition of a local analysis scheme improves the filterperformance first of all in its variance estimates but also in its meansolution.